Faces of the Titanic: Hero Mary Kelly cared for two French orphans who found themselves alone in a lifeboat

Westmeath girl en route to New York to marry and become a domestic servant got in some practice along the way

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PHOTOS - photographs of some of the Irish on board

Profile taken from Senan Molony's book "The Irish Aboard the Titanic"

Ticket number 14312. Paid £7 15s.
Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Castlepollard, County Westmeath.
Destination: 113 West 15th Street, New York city.

Orphans saved from the Titanic by Mary Kelly (22) created one of the abiding sensations of the tragedy. They were the ‘Titanic Waifs’, two curly-haired French boys named Lolo and Momon, who found themselves alone and adrift in an open lifeboat with only a young Irish girl to comfort them with her crooning foreign tongue. The children were parentless only because their 32-year-old father, Michel Navratil, had stolen them from their mother Marcelle in a tug-of-love snatch from the south of France. Toddler Michel was aged three and his brother Edmond Roger only two. They were smuggled to Southampton where their father signed aboard under the name of Louis Hoffman.

When disaster struck, ‘Hoffman’ handed his two boys lovingly into the arms stretched out to receive them from collapsible D, the last boat lowered. It was near two o’clock now, and close to the end. Mary Kelly helped take them into the boat and then soothed them in their uncomprehending distress.

Mary Kelly was uniquely qualified to do so. A young girl who loved children, she was planning to have many of her own and was on her way to New York to marry the man of her dreams – boyfriend John Heslin from her home place who had travelled over to America some months earlier to prepare a place for them both.

Mary was a domestic and she hoped to get work in the big houses in New York, possibly as a nanny caring for the children of the gentry. With the French boys pressed tearfully to her skirts and bosom, she may have thought it was a little early to begin her calling, but that she needed the practice. When the children were landed safely aboard the Carpathia, a determined effort was made to discover who they were. But the shocked tots were incapable of telling. Eventually passengers who had known the father on board – he now floating dead in the Atlantic with a loaded revolver in his pocket – identified them by their false name, Hoffman.

Mary Kelly cared for her charges until they landed in New York, when the press had a field day. Eventually the tots were claimed as a near-trophy by First-Class passenger Margaret Hays, while feverish attempts were made to reunite them with their family. Eventually Marcelle Navratil came forward and the boys were on their way home.

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